Hello, it's Matt at Collaboration Coach,
and welcome to the Roadmap Radar for December 21.
We've got some new features from the roadmap for SharePoint coming up for you very soon,
but before we get into that, I thought we'd do something a bit different
as we're coming to the end of the year.
I looked back through all the updates and new features that we've covered on the Radar this year
and I picked out my favourite ones.
So I'd love to know what you think of them.
Am I right or wrong and which one is your favourite
or tell me which ones I've missed.
So here are my picks of the best of 2021 starting with Teams
which as usual got most of the attention this year.
Back in 2020, Teams meetings really had some catching up to do with Zoom,
Microsoft were way behind,
and this year they caught up with features like Webinars, breakout rooms, polling and Q&A,
and even added some innovation of their own like the Together Mode view.
My Analytics evolved into Viva Insights this year
and Microsoft rolled out a new insights app for Teams.
The rebranded app had a dashboard and features for reflection, praise and focus time
and a partnership with Headspace.
They were all very welcome and showed Microsoft's continued commitment to investing in wellbeing tech.
Outlook on the Web had a new board view feature
that showed us how different apps could be combined to make a new kind of workspace.
The boards allow us to work with email, calendars and tasks all in one place.
There was a lot of investment in SharePoint page authoring this year,
which was great for us editors.
We saw a new custom page templates feature, new toolbars, navigation
and all the new Viva Connections dashboards and feeds.
And I'm a big fan of the idea of Whiteboard,
but in the past it's let me down many times with crashes and lag at crucial moments,
but this year we saw Whiteboard evolve into something much more solid and rich,
with features for shapes, images, documents and tons of templates
and no more lag and rock solid performance, so far anyway.
Okay so that's my pick.
if you want to vote on these I've added a poll to the channel so please let me know what you think
and I'll publish the results of the vote in January's Radar
or tell me what I missed in the comments. I'd love to know.
Okay so now let's look at the roadmap.
And we've got some updates for Whiteboard and Sharepoint.
Microsoft's Whiteboard app is gradually being rebuilt to use OneDrive to store its boards.
This means that when we create a new board from the Whiteboard app
a file is added to the Whiteboard folder in OneDrive.
We'll be able to open them up from the browser, copy, move and delete them
and best of all we can now share them
and manage access to them just like a normal file.
Microsoft say that saving Whiteboards to OneDrive will be the default by March next year
and if you want to use this feature before then,
administrators can opt in through the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
I'll put a link in the description that explains how to do that
and if you're going to do it, read the article carefully
because there are some versions of Whiteboard that aren't supported during this transition.
With this new feature, when we share an audio or video file from OneDrive or SharePoint
we can now choose to block the download.
So we just choose who we want to share with, and then toggle the 'block download' on.
People viewing the video with the link you shared will be able to watch it in the browser
but they will not see the download button in the toolbar at the top.
This feature is rolling out now and will be complete by the end of January.
This feature will give us a new navigation option for SharePoint team sites.
Team site owners will be able to switch the team site navigation orientation
from vertical to horizontal.
We'll be able to have mega menus and cascading navigation in our team sites
just like we do in our communication sites today,
and we'll be able to turn off the navigation completely if we want to.
This feature should be rolling out now and will be complete by the end of January.
This feature update will make it easier to author pages in SharePoint.
When we add text web parts to our pages now the toolbar will have more options in it .
The text toolbar will be the full width of the web part
and it could shrink and grow according to the section it's in.
We can choose the ellipsis for the other formatting options
and this means we can make edits in line rather than open the formatting panel on the right hand side.
This new toolbar feature is rolling out now
and should be complete by the end of December.
A new button for Microsoft lists is going to be added to the SharePoint bar.
The list shown will be personalised to whoever opens it
and it will show us our recent and favourite lists.
This new button is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of January.
We'll soon see a new sharing and copy link feature
that will make it easier for us to share our files in SharePoint and OneDrive.
Now when we choose the 'copy link' option for a file or folder
we'll be able to change who can use it too.
We can choose from the four standard sharing options that you always see in OneDrive and SharePoint
and you will also be able to apply settings like editing and 'block download'.
This is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of January.
Here are some more features for SharePoint page authors to make it easier to create amazing pages.
A focus mode is coming so that when we edit a page all the navigation is pushed out the way
so it isn't so cluttered.
If that doesn't suit us, we'll be able to manually come out of focus mode if we want to.
The section and web part labels are also being updated.
They'll appear bolder and make it clearer to see what's on the page.
All the toolbars are moving to the top of the web parts
and all possible actions will be available from there
so we don't have to open up other panels to make changes.
These new authoring features are rolling out now and should be complete by the end of February.
Okay, so that's the Roadmap Radar for December '21.
Thanks to everyone for watching Radar this year.
We really appreciate your support and can't wait to see you next year.
Have a great holiday and see you in '22.